[petsfed]

My last experience with U-Haul (October 2021 to March 2022) is indeed my last experience with them.

Over and above the standard incompetence stemming from franchisees somehow working against an umbrella organization for scheduling, pickup, dropoff, etc they somehow superimposed somebody else's data (including DL, name, address, last 4 of credit card) onto our reservation. This meant that when they couldn't contact the (wrong) phone number to confirm scheduled drop off of equipment, they just canceled it. This in turn delayed the whole move by a day, since our local office couldn't re-dispatch on the same day, because ... reasons? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this security incident was in fact just their own lousy database implementation leaving things exposed.

The entire moving industry seems built on the understanding that, regardless of what the law says, the customer is entrusting the entirety of their earthly possessions to this industry they (hopefully) engage with once a decade or more. Every aspect of the process has this thinly veiled extortive quality to it. I'm really not sure how to engineer that out. There's little real recourse, as there are few frequent repeat customers to "just take their money elsewhere".

[jstarfish]

> This in turn delayed the whole move by a day, since our local office couldn't re-dispatch on the same day, because ... reasons? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this security incident was in fact just their own lousy database implementation leaving things exposed.

From experience with a franchise whose business model had to account for network outage/unavailability (in rural areas, during natural disasters, etc.), given your mention of a 24h delay I'd speculate that U-Haul might have a similar system in place-- an on-site database that synchronizes with the remote during overnight batch processing.